Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

This is a bill to increase funding for our public schools.

I'm a product of public education and damn proud of it.

Education is the most powerful cause for good in this country.

It doesn't just change lives.

Its impact ricochets through generations.

It changes communities and it changes countries.

It's changed ours.

And it's public education that does most of that heavy lifting: more than 6,700 public primary and high schools across the country, full of children from every background, every religion and every culture, and mums and dads up and down the income scale, doing every sort of job.

That's part of what makes public education special. It's for everyone.

But it also does something else.

It plays an outsized role in educating the most disadvantaged children in this country, the children who are most likely to start behind or to fall behind, the children who need our help the most.

And these are the schools that are the most underfunded.

One in 10 children today are below the minimum standards that we set for literacy and for numeracy.

But one in three children from poor families are below that standard, and most of those children are in our public schools.

Many never catch up and many never finish school.

Over the last eight years the percentage of students finishing high school has gone down, not up—from 85 per cent to 79 per cent.

That drop isn't happening everywhere.

In non-government schools the percentage of students finishing school is either pretty flat or going up.

Where the drop is happening is in our public schools—from 83 per cent to 73 per cent.

And it's happening at a time when it's more important to finish school than ever before, where more and more jobs require you to finish school and then get a qualification from TAFE or uni.

This is what we have to turn around.

This is what we have to fix.

And this is what this legislation is about.

In 2011 David Gonski delivered the report that recommended a new funding formula for schools, what we now call the schooling resource standard—or SRS.

The SRS sets the estimated level of total public funding each school should receive to fund the cost of schooling each year.

At the moment, the base per-student amount is $13,570 for a child in primary school and $17,053 for a child in high school.

As part of the model that David Gonski recommended, additional funding is also provided for:

These are what we call loadings.

For most non-government schools, the base per-student amount is reduced depending on the median income of the parents of the children who attend the school.

This means, for example, that at a non-government school where the median family income of the parents is very high the school only gets 20 per cent of the SRS base amount.

All of this is what's often described as the Gonski model or needs-based funding.

At the moment all non-government schools are funded at the level that David Gonski set all those years ago, or they're on track to get there, or they are above it and coming back down to it.

But most public schools aren't.

The Commonwealth government provides 80 per cent of the SRS funding for non-government schools and the state and territory governments provide the other 20 per cent.

For public schools it's the reverse.

The Commonwealth provides 20 per cent of the SRS funding and the states and territories are supposed to provide another 75 per cent.

Some do. Some don't.

That means that there is at least a five per cent gap.

At the last election we promised 'to work with all states and territories to get all public schools on a path to 100 per cent of the SRS'.

What that means is both the Commonwealth government chipping in more and the states and territories chipping in more to fill that gap.

To do that we have to amend the Australian Education Act.

At the moment the act says the Commonwealth government will provide a maximum 20 per cent of the schooling resource standard to public schools.

This bill turns that maximum into a minimum.

It turns that ceiling into a floor.

It enables the Commonwealth government to ratchet up funding for public schools.

And it makes it harder for future governments to rip that money out.

It means that, when the Commonwealth government does a deal with a state or territory to increase funding to public schools, that bigger Commonwealth share becomes the new floor for the state or territory.

It's locked in and it can't go backwards without changes to the act.

We've done three of those deals so far this year: with Western Australia, with the Northern Territory and with Tasmania.

All of them involve the Commonwealth government chipping in more and the state and territory governments chipping in more.

All of them mean more funding from 1 January next year.

In the case of Western Australia it means every public school there will be fully funded by 1 January 2026, just over 12 months away.

In the case of Tasmania it means every public school will be fully funded by no later than 2029.

And in the case of the Northern Territory it means something that promises to be truly transformational.

At the moment Northern Territory public schools receive approximately 80 per cent of the funding that they are supposed to get under the Gonski model.

That is less than anywhere else in the country.

In effect it means one in five children in the Northern Territory are not receiving any funding at all.

The agreement that I signed this year fixes that.

It doubles the Commonwealth's investment in public schools in the Northern Territory.

And it brings forward the day that all Northern Territory public schools are fully funded by more than 20 years.

And it means that some of the most disadvantaged public schools in this country today will now be some of the best funded.

But to make this happen we need to pass this bill.

There are some people who say that funding isn't important and that we just need practical reform.

And there are others who say the exact opposite.

The truth is we need both: funding and reform.

As David Gonski said in his report:

… resources alone will not be sufficient to fully address Australia's schooling challenges and achieve a high-quality, internationally respected schooling system. The new funding arrangements must be accompanied by continued and renewed efforts to strengthen and reform Australia's schooling system.

I agree.

That's why the agreements we've struck with Western Australia, with Tasmania and with the Northern Territory are not a blank cheque.

They are tied to real and practical reforms. That includes:

All of this is part of the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement, which the Commonwealth and the states and territories have developed together.

It also includes targets and measures to make sure that this money glows in the dark.

I want parents and teachers to know where this funding is going.

That's why this bill and the agreement strengthen the reporting and public transparency requirements around how taxpayer funding is invested, without placing additional burdens on schools.

The agreement includes requirements for states and territories to outline how the additional money is being invested in these key reform areas, and a new public reporting dashboard.

And the bill includes a new annual ministerial statement to the Australian parliament on the progress of school education reform agreements.

This is important reform. But it is just one part of the reforms that we need to make to make our education system better and fairer.

We need to reform higher education as well.

That's what the Universities Accord is about. It's a blueprint for reform to higher education over the next 10 years and beyond.

What it says is that we need to build a workforce by the middle of this century where 80 per cent of working age people have a TAFE qualification or a university degree.

And the only way to do that, it says, is to help more people from poor families, more people from regional Australia and more people from the bush to get a crack at university and to succeed when they get there.

We also have to reform early education.

That's what the Productivity Commission's report that we released a few weeks ago is all about.

It says that it's these same children—children from poor families, children from the regions and the bush, and children from disadvantaged backgrounds—are the least likely to get access to child care or preschool and the most likely to benefit from it.

And this, what we're doing here, is the critical piece in the middle: helping those same children who start behind or fall behind to catch up and keep up and helping more students finish high school.

It is what the Prime Minister calls opening the door of opportunity—a country where no-one is held back and no-one is left behind.

That, at its core, is what public education is about—what it's always been about.

That's what this bill is about. If you support lifting funding for our public schools you will support this bill, and I commend it to the House.

Debate adjourned.